I was struck by this tweet from Lynne Murphy today: For those who don’t know, Lynne is an American linguist who lives in England and teaches at the University of Sussex, and blogs regularly about differences between British and American varieties of English.

When I wrote about my son’s use of “they” pronouns to refer to a single, specific person, I mentioned how there are people who want to be referred to with “they” or another set of gender-neutral pronouns because they don’t want to be identified by a gender. This change is also happening, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. A few months ago I got into a small argument on Facebook.

The news these days is that “cisgender” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED is a descriptive tool, so if people are using the word, the editors should put it in. But as a transgender person, I don’t like the word and I’m not happy people are using it. Ben Zimmer had a nice writeup about the word in March.

By now you’ve probably heard about Rachel Doležal, Africana Studies Professor at Eastern Washington University (despite what they say) and President of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, whose parents recently revealed to the media that their daughter has no known African ancestry (within the past few millennia, at least). There have been a number of interesting commentaries connecting Doležal’s actions to the phenomenon of mixed-race Americans

Today I was walking with my son, and we passed two men going the other way. I said to him, “Did you see how one of those guys was really red in the face?” “No, what’s so special about them being red in the face?” “I think he was drunk. Sometimes when people get really drunk, their faces get red that way. Not every red face means the person is drunk;

I’ve talked in the past about two kinds of category fights, one involving accusations of bait-and-switch tactics, another where the accusation is free riding. Often these aspects of the fight are obscured or denied, and the conflict is instead presented as between a right way and a wrong way to think about the categories.

In a recent post I talked about how the same category (“tea,” for example) can have different default assumptions for different people. This is actually a very big deal, one that people have lost their lives over. For such a heated topic it receives relatively little attention in semantics. These default assumptions matter because they’re an important part of the way we use categories.

I once surprised a friend by ordering tea in a pizza parlor. She did not expect anyone to drink hot tea with pizza. Someone ordering that in Germany where she grew up, or Philadelphia where she lived, would be surprising. But it would be just as surprising in my hometown of New York. I asked for “tea” as an experiment. As I predicted, the waitress was not surprised by my order, and brought a large glass of iced tea.

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.” Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it. The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought

I’ve never been to Baltimore, but I would like to visit one day. I’ve never watched “The Wire,” but I’ve seen a couple of John Waters movies. I also went on a date once with a woman from Baltimore.